Tracy R Reed wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Yes but why didn't Linux kill off the open source *BSDs as well?
Your argument would imply they should have tapered off too.
It practically did.
That's a pretty bold statement. The various BSD projects were installed
on a lot more machines than Linux for a long time.
The primary advantage that Linux had was that it worked on some *REALLY*
awful, broken, POS hardware. Since the BSD systems had both some money
floating around them as well as being more concentrated near academic
environments (which subsidized much better hardware), they tended to not
bother with the crappiest, cheapest hardware.
IMO, that's the big reason Linux took off--it ran on the commodity
hardware ahead of schedule. Think about networking cards--oh, man, were
the BSD compatible cards expensive. Linux, on the other hand, would run
on things like the NE2000 which would occasionally do all manner of
nasty things to hang your system. And the NE2000 was far from the
*worst* card that Linux would work with.
BSD had a head-start on Linux. Solaris was even BSD
based at first IIRC. But BSD was not yet "free" and embroiled in a
SCO-like legal fight when Linux came out. Linux picked up massive
amounts of developer mindshare while BSD remained relatively stagnant.
BSD also fragmented into about 4 different systems around 1991/1992 when
Linux was starting to pick up steam. This was probably a stronger
impact than legal issues. Think about the amount of duplicated effort
on the userspace.
For some reason, BSD seems to attract folks that chafe at hierarchy and
authority (read: flaming a$$h0les). Shrug. And it *still* continues.
Look at Matt Dillon and DragonFly BSD. In spite of everything, I'm glad
these people exist even if most people find working with them completely
intolerable.
Even today the pace of development on Linux is much faster than BSD.
While I will probably concede this, I don't always regard it as a plus.
I will point out that the *BSD's seem to be better able to get complex
things right with less grief than on the Linux side. The TCP stack has
always been the technology leader. VM changes provoke far less drama.
The GEOM subsystem went in with drama, but at least it went in (the
Linux FS abstractions are a mess). The memory allocator on FreeBSD is
much superior to Linux (so much so that Mozilla is stealing it for Firefox).
The folks on the *BSD side still seem to care more about stability than
the Linux side. I think it's part of the whole "big house" thing. A
BSD release gives you a compatible kernel *and* userspace. Whereas,
Linus does the kernel and leave the userspace up to RedHat, SuSE,
Debian, etc.
-a
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